


reproduction of lost parts

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Demisexuality, F/M, First Time, Object Insertion, The Crab Cycle, the final anatomical frontier: your own butthole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:07:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24430297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: Goodsir follows Silna out into the fog, and considers the natural regenerative ability of the common crustacean.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Lady Silence | Silna
Comments: 14
Kudos: 62





	reproduction of lost parts

Silna had not let herself hope to hear the sound of footsteps behind her, and for many minutes she did not, and thought herself solemnly correct in her pragmatism.

But then, as a dream, it came: the unmistakable echoing, slate against shoe, uneven and desperate as it staggered after her. 

She didn’t stop walking; not until she felt a gentle touch on her shoulder, and even then, she didn’t turn around. 

And then finally she lifted her eyes and there he was before her: out of breath, eyes frantic, and with a bag of his own carried on his back. 

So he did not plan to return, then. Something soared inside her: a bird, or a shooting star. 

He put his hands up, in silent supplication. Waiting for her, perhaps, to tell him it was alright that he was here, that it was good he had come. 

It would be undignified of her position to fling her arms around him, sob into the soft hair of his beard, laugh with joy and relief. She wanted to, yes, but she was no child. She was a shaman, and a disgraced one at that.

So she nodded, and smiled, let a hand fall once more on his chest. And this time he put his hand atop hers, capturing it against him; faintly, through his inadequate layers, she felt his steady heart. 

They walked on in silence for a good while. She could tell that he was just as half-convinced as she was, that this was all a mere imagining, of a mind battered by hardships and playing shadows on the tent wall to amuse itself. At any moment he might turn into a gull and fly away. At any moment she might sink through the slate and leave only her furs in a pile on the ground. She could only move forwards, leaving fear behind, even as it pursued her.

Eventually he asked a question in his language. She had spent enough time with him, in the bellies of his great dark beasts and on their journey away from them, to understand: he wanted to know where they were going. 

She pointed west, towards the coastline. They were headed to the ice, to make camp; soon she would travel the rest of the way to her people, but before then she needed to rest, and prepare for what awaited her.

He wanted to help. He always wanted to help: there was a goodness in him, strong and bright as summer to melt the ice and bring the game. 

“You have no sled to pull,” he pointed out, his Inuktitut charmingly garbled, “but if you did, I would pull it for you.” 

She took his meaning, and handed him her bag. He slung it over his shoulder alongside his own, and they went together towards the ice. 

  
  


*** 

She had told Goodsir her name, back on the ship.  _ Silna,  _ she’d whispered to him, in the dimly lit storeroom, as they talked late into the night, the icebound ship creaking around them. 

He would never hear her speak it again, which was a shame; but he had taken to whispering it to her, when they spoke— careful always that there was no one else around to hear, for she had been insistent it be known only to him. 

She’d always been so out of place, hidden away in the dark amongst the pemmican and the munitions. She deserved the ice, a palace of it, shining under the aurora like a cut jewel. 

The shelter— _ igloo— _ that he helped her build now was no palace. Even so, it had promise: protection, warmth. A beauty of its own, in the way it blended in with the landscape,  _ belonged,  _ in a way that the crew’s ragged tents decidedly had not. 

The makeshift home rose rapidly, many hands making quick work. Once they were ensconced safely inside, she removed from her bag a small soapstone lamp—  _ qulliq,  _ it was called, if he remembered correctly— and a sealskin flask of oil. Then she rummaged through his bag until she found the matches he’d brought, and soon the little ice room warmed with a comfortable glow. 

Goodsir knew it was useless to ask questions that she had no way of answering, but he did so regardless. A nervous tic of his, especially unbound now that he had left the camp behind, no commanding officers to obey, no shipboard etiquette to heed. 

“ _ The Tuunbaq. Is it held? _ ” He switched to English. “How do you stop it from coming, now that you are gone from the camp?” 

She gazed at him, cautious, yet unguarded. He had learned to read her face; he wondered sometimes if it had become to him like the ice itself to Mr. Blanky, revealing in its subtleties the secrets of the present, past, and future. 

“ _ Please, _ ” he said. “ _ I will do whatever I can. Whatever you need.  _ If there’s anything that can help your people, or mine…” 

She tilted her head, intelligence sparking in those dark eyes. She amazed him sometimes. All the time. Her capacity for bravery, for ingenuity, for sacrifice. 

Perhaps if more of the men had been like her— but no, no man could ever be like her. Certainly no English man. With every moment that passed in her presence he regretted less and less his decision to leave, to turn away from the chaos and to the fog and run stumbling after Silence. He felt no pang at the thought of Bridgens left alone to care for the men, as he’d thought he might. The man was dedicated, and with all of Goodsir’s books and bottles was surely capable of rising to the occasion. 

Goodsir had done so much already. And tomorrow, perhaps, he would do more still: see if she would be willing to to persuade her people to head to the camp, bring them fresh meat and nurse them back to health before they moved on. 

Or perhaps he would not. The inside of his mind was less and less predictable these days. A symptom of the tin-sickness, the madness that had mantled the men, maybe, or just a natural process, a slow and steady becoming.

Silna stepped forward and put a hand to his face. Her expression was one of infinite grace. He did not deserve it; oh, how he did not deserve it. 

He wondered how long it would take the impulse to fade, the one that had commanded him that first night with her to defend their voyage, their mission to discover the Passage; and again, only hours ago, to promise her that his home was a good place, full of good people. 

It remained with him still. He thought longingly of the mazy streets of Edinburgh, of the majesty of the Royal Institution, where he’d spent many a happy hour absorbing the newest and most fascinating developments in natural philosophy. Would the fierce affection he had for his homeland ever leave? If she could cut it out of him, like she cut out her tongue— well, he would let her, even beg of her to do it, make it quick and sure. He would be glad to be rid of it, made anew into an Arctic man, clean and free. 

“Thank you,” he said. What was he thanking her for? He was not entirely sure. “ _ Qujanaqqutit.”  _

She nodded, and then removed her thick outer layer of furs and laid them down on the floor of the igloo, creating a makeshift bedroll. Beneath it she wore another layer of tunic, this one of lighter caribou-skin, the fur facing inwards. He certainly could not see the shape of her any better underneath it— it was no negligee— but the very act of removal quickened something in him, despite himself. There was trust in it, in that simple act. She’d started over a bridge the night she laid down beside him, comforted him as he wept— perhaps she meant to complete the crossing tonight. 

He was still standing, even as she reclined. He was exhausted, starving, aching in every joint and muscle, and utterly unsure of what was expected of him. 

She motioned for him to remove his coat, lay it down beside hers. He did so, and sat down stiffly upon it, leaning up against the wall of ice behind him. Then she pointed to his head, and he removed his Welsh wig as well, running a hand through the sorry mess of his unwashed hair. 

He smiled apologetically at her. “I’m not much to look at, I know,” he said. 

With great care, she brought her hands to his face, and kissed him. 

He had never kissed a woman. He did not know at all what was proper, when both parties were still in possession of their tongue— whether they would twine together, or press up against each other, like wild animals battling for dominance. 

But this was a good thing, for it meant he had no expectations, and did not keenly feel any lack. Her mouth had healed well and he tasted only the warm breath of her, the sweetness of her vitality.

Still, as her arms came around him, and one of her hands cupped the back of his head, he could not help thinking at that moment of the power of the crab to regenerate its lost limbs, new growth unfurling from the joint like a flower.

It was no unknown magic: he’d watched it happen dozens of times, subjected the process to extensive scientific investigation, even presented a paper on its intricacies to the Royal Society which became a chapter of his brother’s book. 

If Lady Silence could grow a new tongue, Goodsir would ask her to speak the names of all that surrounded them: the coves and inlets of King William Land, the northern constellations, the winds and the stone and the hours of the day. He wanted to know all these things, and more besides. 

She drew away from his mouth, and began nosing at his neck; her body was pressed fully to his now and he felt, in earnest, the stirrings of physical desire between his legs. It ashamed him. He did not want to seem eager— it was improper, ungentlemanly. He did not want to be forced by the vicissitudes of his wretched masculine physiology into actions that might cause irreparable harm.

Perhaps if he spoke aloud of his beloved  _ crustacea _ , the distension of blood vessels in the limb immediately after injury and the formation of the cicatrix, his mind might prove victorious over his body. 

“Did you know,” he began, his voice a weak stammer, “that the common edible crab has a remarkable ability to regrow its extremities, if they are damaged in any way? The process is quite miraculous, really— first it throws off the remaining parts of the affected limb, and then the blood vessels retract, and fills up with a body, resembling a nucleated cell, within which the germ of future limbs is contained…” 

He trailed off, finding none of this to have had any effect on his prick whatsoever, which still swelled treacherously inside his trousers. In fact, he regretted the outburst almost immediately. That is, until, for the first time since those late nights on _ Erebus,  _ Silna smiled so wide and openly that he could see her teeth, and let out what was unmistakably a small but joyous laugh.

He couldn’t help it; he laughed with her. She was so beautiful. 

Still smiling, she braced her hand at the side of his face, and slipped her thumb into his mouth, as she brought her lips back to his. She wanted to feel him. Her finger, playing her rôle of the tongue, gentled over the back of his bottom teeth, and swiped playfully at the inside of his cheek. 

There was a confidence to her, a graceful initiative; he could find himself subdued by it easily, drawn by her magnetism, spun around and dizzied like the ship’s instruments as they approached the Arctic Circle. 

He had always known his regard for her to be true, far truer than the flimsy, desperate lust that had led the men of  _ Erebus  _ to deposit trinkets outside her makeshift berth.

But even now as she kissed him it was changing, deepening, crystallizing in uncommon ways, taking on aspects that had thus far in his life been foreign to him. All those long summers his friends had spent chasing young ladies, he had remained wholly wrapped up in his studies, dissections and microscopy and surgical technique. He’d never had a thought to spare for marriage; he found the lack of distraction convenient and comfortable. It suited him as well as his surname. 

So he had not expected this, the wanting of her. It had come on so fast, and was so unfamiliar, but it could not be anything other than what it clearly was— the most human need of all, the procreative urge.

But what right did he have to take her, in the way a man takes a woman? The thought of him inside her, here, without so much as a declaration of intent, an exchange of vows, a commitment of any kind— it filled him with a sickly discomfort. He needed to make her understand.

“Silna,” he said, “I will not— please, there need not be any— consummation, I don’t know how it is done with your people, but believe me, I am content with— with this, with your embrace, I beg you, do not believe I demand anything more—” 

She raised an eyebrow, a fondly judgmental expression he knew to mean,  _ You are thinking too much.  _ He quieted, and slumped back against the igloo wall, as she rummaged in her bag and eventually removed a pair of objects, one slightly larger than the other. 

“ _ Those items are— _ amulets?” he said. He didn’t know the Inuktitut word; it was not one she had chosen to teach him, and he had not pressed her further for it. 

But as she brought them closer he could see clearly that they were not carven objects, of the type her father had worn. They were merely raw material, spare cylindrical chunks of ivory as of yet untouched by the delicate application of a chisel or knife. 

She held them up appraisingly, turning them this way and that in the low light of the  _ qulliq.  _

“What are they for?” he asked. And in Inuktitut: “ _ What will you do?”  _

In answer, she set them down on her furs. With a swift movement, she then removed her under-tunic, revealing her bare chest. As she folded the garment and put it aside Goodsir could not help but breathe out a soft sigh at the sight— for he hadn’t known, not really, how intensely he’d wanted to see her, until she was there before him. 

He, who had examined hundreds of living human bodies with perfect detachment— he who could recite the glands of the reproductive system and their many maladies— laid low by the sight of a pair of perfect breasts, as if a schoolboy.

His hand lifted, but he hesitated; she saw right through the hesitation to the need underneath and took his hand in hers, pressed his palm to her breast, let him cup at it, rub a thumb across her nipple and feel it pebble and rise at his touch. She let out a delicate moan; this was clearly pleasurable to her, to be touched this way, and she let him continue for some time, caressing the other too, letting out little huffs of satisfaction as he explored. 

Then she moved his hand away, and leaned forward. She tugged his trousers down, and his woolen drawers with them, creating a sudden nakedness in inverse of hers. 

And he let her, for it had struck him, belatedly: who was he to presume she did not know precisely what she wanted, and how to go about getting it? That was what an Englishman would do— but he had left the camp behind, of his own volition. He was far outside the context of what an Englishman would or should do, now. There was only their mutual desire, an island unconnected by any isthmus. 

So when his cockstand bobbed free, and she took hold of it with a hand slicked with oil from her sealskin flask, he gave himself leave to arch up into her touch, writhe and clutch at her arm, squeeze his eyes shut as pleasure took him. 

Her hand on his prick was steady and confident. She hummed a little while she stroked him; a wordless tune she clearly knew well, its melody lilting and strange to his ears but beautiful all the same. 

It felt nothing at all like his own touch did, those infrequent nights when he took himself in hand, out of sheer boredom or idle curiosity. Being at the mercy of her movements was bearing him up into new heights of firsthand understanding:  _ so this is what it’s like.  _

He moved to touch her, unable to hold himself back; he ran a hand down her side, from her underarm to the waist of her sturdy trousers, and then rising back to clutch at her hip, the soft skin there, the unyielding muscle underneath from a lifetime of walking. 

Soon she let go of him, and he bade himself not to be disappointed; surely after bringing him thus far she would not leave him wanting. He trusted her, in that regard— he trusted her always. 

With anticipation he watched as she picked up the smaller of the two ivory pieces, and slicked it with more of her oil. She rubbed some off on one fingertip, which he watched with mounting understanding as it moved below his balls, gently pressing at his perineum before circling his entrance with intent. 

When she pressed inside, he cried out, not at all in pain but in mere surprise at the sensation, and she withdrew immediately, her brow furrowed in concern. 

He panted, “No, no— it’s all right. Yes.  _ Pittauruq.  _ Good, good.”

This she smiled at, a smile that spoke of pride and delight and relief, and she leaned down to deliver him a kiss, which he received hungrily, reveling in how close it brought her to him, this sharing of breath between them. 

She was still kissing him as she resumed her activity below; first her finger again, and then, at last, the ivory itself.

The piece was warmed by her hands and the oil, smooth and solid; when it breached him, he let out a high and girlish sound that he might have been ashamed by, had he not been distracted by tremendous sensation of its greased slide, which overwhelmed him at once. 

He had dissected twenty bodies, and performed surgery on countless more; the array of organs in the male pelvis was well known to him. Silna’s miraculous object was surely stimulating the prostate gland, which lay at the base of the bladder, and performed a function related to the storage of seminal fluid. 

But no pleasure like this had been told of in his books. No anatomy lesson had taught how its stimulation would make him tense and shake and how, combined with Silna’s knowing grip on his prick, it would bring him to such ecstasy. 

Despite the names thrown at him aboard ship— _ you Mary-Ann, you Margery—  _ Goodsir had never desired to be buggered (or for that matter, to do the buggering). He’d never looked upon another man and desired his touch in such a manner, and had in fact often wondered, in his philosophical way, at what appeal such inversion could possibly hold. 

The answer, now, was before him, to the question of why one might seek this out; the solidity and stretch of the piece at his fundament an astonishing counterpoint to the manual attention she had taken up again at his prick. 

_ “Uvittiagu,”  _ he choked out,  _ just a moment. _ He was close and coming quickly closer, but he needed a moment to savor it, to capture it in his memory: the fullness of the ivory inside him, the hot, building pressure in his prick, the sight of Silna gazing down at him with such care and affection to give him the feeling of being bathed in light. 

How long had it been, since he was looked upon with love? Not since bidding his brothers farewell at Greenhithe, he thought. Years; long, cold years. No one on  _ Erebus  _ or  _ Terror  _ had called him by anything other than his surname, or sought him for anything other than the performance of his duties. 

Goodsir cried out as the piece brushed up again and again at the sensitive conjunction inside. He desperately wanted to tell her how good it felt, but found that his hard-won Inuktitut had deserted him. And his native English, too, it seemed: he could only whisper her name. “Silna, Silna, Silna,” he said, as she knelt above him, moving the piece in steadily quickening strokes. 

He didn’t know why she had chosen this strange method to pleasure him, which was hard to accept. He wanted to babble on, ask and ask, with every word he knew: Why? _ Hu'mat? _ What for? 

But she could not tell him— and even if she were suddenly able, even if she could turn her eyes to semaphore flags and hand him Marryat’s  _ Signals  _ to read them by, he doubted that she would choose to do so. 

It was not his to know. Better to lie back and be filled by her, feel her hands on him, be gratified by her in such a foreign manner, and not care whether it was part of some ritual, or some ancient tradition, or simply because she desired to see him like this, flushed and open and finally spending, in great arcs, across his chest and neck. 

His crisis was a silent one, or would have been if not for Silna’s humming, an ascending course of sliding notes that accompanied explosions behind his eyes, great flashes of beauty, he thought he saw the ice— the sky— the spread of nucleoli on the surface of a crab’s regenerating limb, vast and multiplying underneath his microscope.

She removed the piece from him with a slow, dragging glide that wrenched one last wave of pleasure from him, his prick giving a helpless twitch at his stomach.

As he lay panting, she rubbed the ivory in the spend puddled on his skin, where his shirt had been rucked up and away by their movements. He watched as she coated it, and then set it aside, next to the  _ qulliq—  _ to dry, perhaps? 

With weak arms he tried to push himself up to sitting, but she pressed him back down, and took a handkerchief from his bag to clean what was left. Then she lay herself down beside him, and brought herself close; he wanted to hold her, then, so he did.

He did not have the words in Inuktitut to tell her how he felt; it would be useless to try English, and risk her not understanding him completely. It could wait, until he learned more of her tongue. He had time. 

So instead he picked up where he left off. “It’s not just in case of injury, you know. The common crab, when pinned by a limb, unable to free itself, can voluntarily throw it off from a point at the basal extremity of the limb’s first phalanx…” 

She nestled into his chest as he talked, stroking his face, then enfolding his hand in hers, running a finger over his knuckles, dried and cracked from the cold. 

He had broken himself away, leaving the life he’d known behind at Terror Camp, like an abandoned limb. 

But in its place, something was growing. It was not impossible, Goodsir knew, nor wrong. It was natural, and beautiful, and understood. 

***

They rested, his arms curled protectively around her, an inverted reflection of that first night she had come to him. 

His breathing was peaceable, unlabored, free of pain or fear. The  _ qulliq  _ burned low as he dreamed, and Silna wished dearly that she could join him in unconsciousness, but she stayed awake. She could not sleep until she knew. 

Perhaps a few more exhausted hours passed before she heard it: the unmistakable sound of movement outside; the lumbering crunch of the Tuunbaq’s footsteps, and the soft thump of a seal being dropped onto the ice. 

It had worked. 

Silna turned herself in Goodsir’s arms so that she could face him, and pressed one last grateful kiss to his forehead, before letting herself fall away into rest at last.

  
  


***

**Author's Note:**

> This is not-so-secretly a fix-it due to the fact that the power of love means Tuunbaq never attacks Terror Camp, Silna doesn’t get banished, & with Goodsir’s help she is able to convince her people to lend a helping hand until Ross shows up. BOOM PROBLEM SOLVED
> 
> Inuit vocabulary is from [here!](https://tusaalanga.ca/)
> 
> There’s a really cool video about the qulliq [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjjxUE6XSdQ)
> 
> I read about the history of the discovery of the prostate [ here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/tre.676) although I’m still not entirely sure if Goodsir would or wouldn’t have known about its pleasure properties. Just go with it. 
> 
> Goodsir’s lovely little crabs can be read about at length in multiple chapters in [this book,](https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/-AY_AAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1) including the chapter from which this fic takes its title. 
> 
> I ended up cutting all the stuff about Goodsir’s tutor, Robert Knox, but just know that at the very moment Goodsir had the most amazing orgasm of his life given to him by an Inuit woman, the extreme megaracist Knox got a severe case of the shits that didn’t clear for days.
> 
> Lastly, I'm on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe) and [Tumblr! ](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com)


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